At first, Recording Academy president Neil Portnow said that women who want to win more Grammys — as if the golden trophies at the end of the misogyny rainbow were, alone, the issue at hand — could solve this problem all by themselves if they were just willing to “step up.” Amid calls for his resignation, Portnow slid back from his comments, and after his apologies were made, he announced the creation of an independent task force “to review every aspect of what we do as an organization and identify where we can do more to overcome the explicit barriers and unconscious biases that impede female advancement in the music community.”

Because if you are really ready to reckon with the sexism in your industry — that is to say, you realize it’s not merely some minor inconvenience but rather a systemic, rampant, seemingly incontrovertible crisis — then that is what you do.

Tchen is who Hollywood turned to when, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein revelations and its aftershocks, it was well past time to get organized and act. Tchen is a co-founder of Time’s Up, the formal Hollywood initiative to combat sexual harassment and assault within and outside the entertainment industry, which launched on New Year’s Day. She’s leading the legal defense fund, which provides subsidized legal and PR support to those who have experienced sexual harassment or violence in the workplace.

She is the attorney corporations employ when they are ready to do more than the perfunctory sexual harassment trainings, when they realize that sexism has crossed a line — namely, the bottom line, because a company that cannot attract and retain women is one that cannot complete in a global marketplace — and want to change.

Tchen was Michelle Obama’s chief of staff and, before that, an assistant to President Barack Obama. (Tchen affectionately refers to the former FLOTUS as her “forever boss.” No offense, 44.) She spent a couple years as the director of the White House Office on Public Engagement, then worked with the president to create the White House Council on Women and Girls, on which she served as executive director. And all of that followed a 23-year legal career in which she rose through the ranks to become a partner in corporate litigation at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, the firm she joined after she graduated from Northwestern Law School and went to undergrad at some school outside Boston.

What might appear at first glance to be a bug in a resume longer than a CVS receipt (zero experience in the music industry) is, according to Portnow, a feature: “The fact that she lacks business ties to the music industry ensures her objectivity as chair,” he said in a statement. “In this moment, the Recording Academy can do more than reflect what currently exists; we can help lead the industry into becoming the inclusive music community we want it to be -— a responsibility that the board and I take seriously. Tina Tchen is an accomplished advocate for women and an impact-oriented leader versed in convening disparate stakeholders for a common purpose.”

A week before the Recording Academy announced Tchen’s appointment, Tchen met with ThinkProgress to talk about her work with the Time’s Up legal defense fund and combatting institutionalized sexism, something she has been doing all her life. Literally, all her life: When she was born, her father, who immigrated to the United States from China with Tchen’s mother, was in denial that he didn’t get the son he’d hoped for and insisted Tchen was a boy for days. (He came around.)

We spoke at the Washington D.C. outpost of her new firm, Buckley Sandler, in the World Wildlife Fund building, a few floors above President Obama’s post-White House office. Arriving especially polished for an ordinary Tuesday afternoon — “I did a little CNN on Time’s Up earlier today,” she explained, laughing. “That’s why I have CNN hair and makeup.” — Tchen dug into how the Time’s Up legal defense fund will work, what tackling workplace sexual harassment at work really entails, and why, in spite of everything, she does not think the solution is to burn it all down. As she sees it, this very moment “is probably the best opportunity we’ve had in generations to make these changes.”

I want to start with the latest data, that you’ve heard from over 1000 people–

1600.

And you’ve raised over $20 million. I’d like to talk through that because it seems both incredible and like a logistical challenge.

Right. Logistical challenge! (laughs) We knew once we launched on January 1st that there would be calls. But I’m not sure we realized how big a volume and across how many industries. The amazing thing about the 1600 requests is they cover, like, 60 different industries. From construction to police officers to hotel workers to government employees. So it really does validate something many of us have thought for a long time: This is very pervasive, and unreported, and it doesn’t know any boundaries in terms of geography or age or even gender or industry. That’s proving to be the case.

“Sexual harassment is the symptom at the end of the road, and the road starts with: What do our workplaces really look like?”

So we’ve done several things, knowing there would be a lot of volume. The National Women’s Law Center, which is the home of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, is staffing up. So there will be dedicated staff. In the meantime, my law firm, Buckley Sanders, and several others, have been sending lawyers over there to help answer the phones and help do the screenings, so that we have the capacity. Because we knew we wanted to answer the requests as they were coming in. So of the 1600 requests, over 1,000 have already got information about lawyers they can call, and they’re in the process of getting representation.

So you’re essentially the field office and ultimately their cases are handled locally?

It’s more than that. We’re really a clearinghouse. We’re a place centrally that people can call if they need help. We’re a place centrally where attorneys can volunteer to take cases, either at a pro bono or reduced fee. And we serve as the clearinghouse as somebody calls for help, figuring out, who are the three or four lawyers in that geography who we can give that client that information?

One of our base principles is, we want the clients to always be able to make their own decisions and be empowered to do that. So the client and the lawyer make their own decision, at the end of the day, of whether they’re going to actually work together to pursue the case, or sometimes people just need advice as to whether they even have a claim or not. Sadly, for a lot of people because of statutes of limitations which are so short, they might not actually have a claim, but they need to have someone walk them through that so they can figure out what their rights are.

How do you determine — is there some kind of hierarchy of who gets the resources that you have and the money that you have? Because there’s a lot of it, but it’s not this bottomless well.

No, and anyone who knows about legal bills, even $21 million isn’t going to go far when you’ve got thousands of cases out there. So one thing is, we’re continuing to fundraise. $21 million is not the cap by any means. The GoFundMe page is still going strong.

“There are still lots of ways to mentor, to be friendly — I mean, I’m a hugger in the office and I still hug lots of people! — without abusing the relationship that you have as the person who controls their career, and their job, and their work environment.”

We’re developing criteria for funding. Of all of the cases that have come in so far have been accepted and linked with lawyers, not all of those cases will necessarily get funded, because we don’t have enough funding for every case. So the NWLC has been working on criteria for how to prioritize cases — how to divide up the money. How much is fair to give per case. This really hasn’t been done before at this scale, so it’s not like we had a lot of examples to work on. But they’re doing a very thoughtful process of developing those criteria.

The closest thing that I can think of is when, after a natural disaster, the Red Cross gets all this money and they have to decide how to divvy it up among people. Do you feel like you then end up in the business of quantifying how bad someone’s experience was?

No, I suppose for a hurricane you might! But here, it will be more around, probably, kinds of activities. We’ll set an amount for, if you’re investigating a case you can get up to this amount. [All the lawyers] are going to have to do it for a reduced fee. We need a very, very discounted fee in order to make sure there’s enough money to go around. And this is a charitable enterprise; no one is in this to make money.

So it’ll probably be by different activity stages of cases: For investigation, a cap up to this amount, for pre-trial discovery. It probably breaks up more like that. It’s not really up to us to decide the specific severity of the cases, and in fact, we can’t really get in that business because a lot of the information to evaluate cases should be privileged. The Legal Defense Fund is not the lawyer for these clients. We’re helping link them up with a lawyer. But how they decide to prosecute the case, and how weak or strong the case is, is really up to the client and his or her lawyer.

Obviously you came to this with so much knowledge already about the scale of sexual harassment and violence in this country. I’m curious what, if anything, has been surprising to you about the emails or calls you’ve been receiving, the responses you’ve been getting?

I think we’ve all been — we’re all still surprised by the breadth. We intellectually knew: We think it’s everywhere. But the idea that we have over 60 different industries among the 1600 folks who’ve called in the first month and a half, that surprised us.

I am not an employment lawyer so I don’t do this every day, so I was surprised, knowing what I do know — which is that we have Title VII, and happily we’ve had Title VII protections under employment law for going on three decades, and it provides for recovery of attorney’s fees when you win the case — so I actually, foolishly thought a lot of these cases already had lawyers, but that people who were speaking out and were getting sued for defamation didn’t have lawyers. I thought we’d have more of those cases.

And we do have a lot of those cases, where people who are speaking out — even though their cases were a long time ago — against people who are rich and powerful who have the resources to sue them, they’re on the defense side, and those cases don’t generate any fees.

“It’s a little bit like bringing your work home: Bringing the outside gladiator that you have to be into the workplace when you’re actually people’s bosses, not their opponent.”

But I am surprised at the number of cases, for example, of low-income women who have been unable to find a lawyer, even though there is the potential for recovery of attorney’s fees at the end, because they don’t make enough and therefore, the recovery’s not very big, so it would be spending a lot of time for not a lot of money. I was surprised at how many people who are out there, who have sexual harassment claims, who still can’t find a lawyer. And of course, we always knew that Title VII doesn’t cover small employers. There are lots of categories of kinds of workers who aren’t covered by those kinds of protections.

One of the things that’s been frustrating to see unfold in the reactions to movements like Time’s Up is this, “Well, I guess you can’t date at the office anymore! I guess you can’t flirt with your waitress anymore!” How do you react to that and respond to that?

We are all worried also, by the backlash. It’s “don’t flirt with your waitress” and it’s “don’t take a female associate on a business trip.”

Right: Don’t mentor young women, Mike Pence rules at dinner.

And what I say is, that’s completely, obviously, the wrong reaction to this. The issues here aren’t about mentoring folks or relationships. Some of this is kind of easy! This is workplaces and how you should behave in a workplace, and the way you behave in a workplace is different from how you behave in a social setting. And that, when you’re the boss, you are always the boss. And you have a power relationship with the people who work for you, and you have to treat them appropriately and with respect.

There are still lots of ways to mentor, to be friendly — I mean, I’m a hugger in the office and I still hug lots of people! — without abusing the relationship that you have as the person who controls their career, and their job, and their work environment. So I think the lines are not that hard to find. But we do have to talk about it more. I think the problem that we’ve had is we don’t talk about it enough to make sure people understand the distinction, and we haven’t allowed people to also voice when they’re uncomfortable so that people can understand. Most people, if you say you’re uncomfortable, they’ll respect that. But we haven’t had a culture where it’s been okay to say, “Well, that doesn’t make me comfortable.”

It also seems that in some of these industries, especially creative industries — I think about somebody like Harvey Weinstein. There’s this pairing of, you get to be a jerk if you’re effective, if you’re a creative genius. Or that those two things are linked in some way: That the kind of outlandish, violent behavior is somehow connected to being an effective boss. You of course have worked for the Obamas. I can’t imagine that working for first lady Michelle Obama involved her belittling her employees in any way.

Right, right.

Why do you think that myth persists?

I did 23 years at a big law firm. I’ve had clients who were some of the biggest companies in the country. And I do think — not the Harvey Weinstein, the most egregious sexual assaults that are involved there, but I do think when you talk about things like verbal abuse and bullying that happens in the workplace, that’s not uncommon. And it’s often tied to, “That’s what you have to do to succeed in the workplace externally.”

If you’re in a pretty competitive industry — you’re a salesperson having to sell a lot against competitors — there are a lot of professions, like my profession, I have to go fight it out in court with people for my clients. That’s what my clients expect. That’s what I know I should be doing to be successful for my clients. But, in a lot of times, I think what happens — and again, we haven’t talked about it enough — is that toughness that you have to succeed at external, to your own workplace, gets translated to how you’re behaving in your office.

It’s a little bit like bringing your work home: Bringing the outside gladiator that you have to be into the workplace when you’re actually people’s bosses, not their opponent. And a lot of times we don’t train people well enough to be bosses, and how to manage people, and a good manager doesn’t manage the folks who are working for them in the same way I would approach an opposing counsel in a case. So we need to learn some of that behavior: How to manage differently, how to mentor differently, and how to be successful in very tough, competitive situations, in a way that doesn’t bring that tough competitiveness back to your own workplace.

I hesitate to give President Trump any credit for this moment that we’re experiencing right now. But it does feel like, as a culture, there are enough people who are angry enough that something like Time’s Up is even happening at all, and that we’re still talking about something that was sparked by a news story that broke in October in what might be the most headline-competitive environment we’ve ever had. I’m curious what you think is fueling that continued attention and passion on the part of the general public.

Here’s who I think we have to credit for a lot of that, and that, quite frankly, is the really brave individuals who are coming forward. And they’re still coming forward at some personal risk, and I think what we’ve not seen in past circumstances when this happened is that volume of outpouring of people feeling empowered to also talk about what happened to them. Those stories, and the proliferation of them, and the wide diversity of stories and the wide diversity of workplace situations, has, I think, kept it going. Because there’s a different industry and work situation with every news cycle. A lot of credit has to go to those folks.

“Nobody knew who Anita Hill was before she started testifying, and many people still, to this day, don’t know who she is. Millions of people know who these women in Hollywood are.”

And I do think the fact that it started with the women in Hollywood, who are very familiar people. In the past, people who would speak out, people didn’t really know or recognize or relate to. Nobody knew who Anita Hill was before she started testifying, and many people still, to this day, don’t know who she is. Millions of people know who these women in Hollywood are. I give them a lot of credit for being willing to use their celebrity, and to continue to use their celebrity, with each passing moment as they continue to speak out, to keep this issue in the forefront. I think that has been contributing a lot. Because people see them on their televisions at night, and see them in the movie theater. They relate to them — they feel like they have a relationship with some of these actresses. And that, I think, has really made people tune into this issue in a way that they haven’t tuned in before when the people making the allegations, which were also horrific, were not people that they knew or thought they knew.

It does feel, too, like people — in ways good and bad — are just closer to the edge than we were two years ago.

Here’s the other thing: Social media, we forget that it’s become such a fabric of our lives. We forget what it was like to spread news around or tell personal stories in a way that got the attention of folks. Before social media, there wasn’t really a vehicle for it. When Anita Hill was testifying 26 years ago, even if somebody had wanted to do Me Too then, there was no platform in which the average person who did identify with her could give voice to that in a meaningful way. (Editor’s note: Tarana Burke founded the Me Too movement in 1997.)

We’re in an age right now, also, where that ability for people to see something that affects them personally, and also join in and speak out publicly about it, to have that seen by thousands of people very quickly, it gives a great power to all of these social change movements.

As much as you’re seeing that the volume of this conversation is so huge, as you say, and more people are participating in it than ever before, is there anything that you think is not being talked about in this arena that should be? Or is there anything you think is being misunderstood?

I want to always make sure that, when we talk about sexual harassment, we can’t just focus on sexual harassment itself. Sexual harassment is the symptom at the end of the road, and the road starts with: What do our workplaces really look like? To really combat sexual harassment, it’s not just: Fix our policies, do some training, and discipline some folks. It is really: Build workplaces that are more truly diverse and where everyone is treated with respect and feels safe. And that is all about addressing core structural issues around how we organize work.

That’s something I’ve been talking about since I was in the White House, with our Summit on Working Families. (Disclosure: The White House Summit on Working Families was co-hosted by the Center for American Progress. ThinkProgress is an editorially independent site housed at the Center for American Progress.) It’s something I’m building a practice here at Buckley Sandler around, which is helping companies build workplace cultures that are more supportive.

Because that’s really how you’re going to solve the problem of sexual harassment, is if you have true diversity in the workforce with women and people of color in leadership as well as in other levels within the company, that you have a workplace culture and a set of conduct that is acceptable that you set by the tone at the top, by the corporation’s heads, that say: This is the kind of company we want to be, this is the kind of workplace we want to have.

Taking those steps will not only, I think, reduce incidences of sexual harassment or, when they occur, we’ll have systems in place that respond to them appropriately. It also will benefit companies. We’ve seen plenty of the data that shows that companies that are more diverse have better returns on investment, they make better decisions, they have lower costs of turnover from their staff. And we now also see — what the current news stories are showing us — the risks to the entire enterprise if you don’t address these issues appropriately. Because you will have the problems that we’re seeing now and they can lead to real damage to your business model and to your company.

What I do hope we can get to is talking about these broader workplace issues as well, and not just the sexual harassment part. Because it doesn’t happen in isolation.

I have a feeling, given your work, that your answer to this question will be no. But because I sometimes feel this way, I want to know if you do, too: When you look at the scope of this problem and you think, okay, to deal with gender discrimination at work, we’re going to have to deal with gender discrimination all over, because we can’t suddenly expect people to skip into their cubicle and be better there than we are everywhere else — do you ever just feel like, we have to burn it all down?

Well, no. (laughs) Maybe it’s our age difference! But no. No, because I’ve seen how things can change. I know so many companies that have gotten better, that have set real different tones, that are in the process of seeing real diversity come through in their senior levels.

“Women are now 50 percent of the workforce. They graduate at a rate that’s 20 percent higher than men, in the United States. So if you want the most talented workers, you need to have a workplace that’s going to attract women as workers.”

I also really believe that the world economic system, and the global economy, and competitiveness, and the demography of workers, is all working in our favor. Meaning that women are now 50 percent of the workforce. They graduate at a rate that’s 20 percent higher than men, in the United States. So if you want the most talented workers, you need to have a workplace that’s going to attract women as workers. And globally, if we want to compete — the U.S. economy — we’re going to have to get better than being one of only two countries in the world without a paid family leave policy, because companies will move off-shore. They’ll get competition from overseas, if we don’t make sure that our workplaces are fully meeting the needs of 21st-century workers.

So all of the external forces driving the population and driving the economy are working in our favor, meaning, the companies that respond on these issues well will be able to respond to the environment that is changing. So it’s a great opportunity. It’s probably the best opportunity we’ve had in generations to make these changes.

You’ve been a part of an administration that sees these issues the way that you do. How does it feel now to be doing this work at a moment when it’s really the opposite messaging coming out of the White House?

Well, one of the things that we’ve known, even when we were in office in the White House, we didn’t have Congress for much of our administration. Therefore, some of the big federal policy changes, like passing the Paycheck Fairness Act, dealing with some of these workplace issues that have to be dealt with statutorily, we’ve confronted for now, several years, the fact that we would not be able to change federal paid leave policy, for example. So for a long time now, I have thought that the best way to change is for companies, employers, workplaces of all sectors, to voluntarily start instituting these changes.

We also have employers that are stepping up and making changes. That’s another part of Time’s Up as well: We’re all about trying to make sustainable change. I think you’ll see more and more companies who are voluntarily providing paid leave, that are changing the composition of their boards to make them more diverse and get more women on them, promoting more women into C-suite. All of those are things that we are starting to see movement on and that we’ll continue to see progress on by the end of the year.

It’s interesting to hear you talk about this all happening organically because I am very curious about: What is the meeting like? Are you just in this room with Oprah, and Shonda Rhimes, and Gwyneth Paltrow? It’s the Illuminati meetings, but just the women!

You know, there’s a great energy. There’s a great support. I’ve been in a lot of meetings with women — because that’s what I do, I’ve worked on women’s issues my entire adult life. So I’m used to the wonderful energy that you get when you’re sitting around a table with the shared experience women have, and trying to make some positive change. For a lot of the actresses, and some of them have said this publicly in interviews, they didn’t really know each other. Their experience is more like being the only woman on set. We, I think on the outside, think: Oh, it’s the Hollywood community!

Right, that they all hang out.

That they all hang out together on a Saturday night. Apparently, not so much! So these meetings have been a wonderful opportunity for them to have that experience that I have had elsewhere, and that’s great for them. They have found a whole new support network for themselves, which is terrific.

This article was originally published at ThinkProgress on March 7, 2018. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Jessica M. Goldstein is the Culture Editor of ThinkProgress.

The White House on Wednesday took time out to promote the value of a flexible workplace that can accomodate two-paycheck families. With 15 million people officially unemployed, it made one nostalgic for a time before the recession, when people worried about the quality of their work lives rather than about just finding a job.

But allowing workers flexible schedules so they can balance their work and family lives isnt just a luxury that should be reserved for flush economic times. As Michelle Obama pointed out at the event that included business and family advocates, “So it’s something that many of the companies here today have discovered, very fortunately, that flexible policies actually make employees more, not less, productive.”

To underscore that point, the White House Council of Economic Advisers released a report that, the White House noted, “discusses the economic benefits of workplace flexibility—such as reduced absenteeism, lower turnover, improved health of workers, and increased productivity.”

Still, there might be a way to combine workplace flexibility with job creation — by adopting the proposal of Dean Baker and others to use unemployment insurance or other funds to help keep people on the job but working fewer hours.

Unfortunately, that sort of approach responding to the clamor for work didn’t get as much attention as innovative ways to promote flexible hours for employees so they can juggle personal and work obligations. As the Huffington Post’s Dan Froomkin reported:

Two out of three American families are so-called “juggler families,” in which parents are forever trying to balance the needs of their job with the needs of their children.

But many workplaces — and government policies — are still stuck in the distant past, operating as if most families still had a single breadwinner, and someone else to mind the kids when they’re out of school, or the grandparents when they need care.

Once you realize that, there are a bunch of employer practices and policy proposals that suddenly make a lot of sense: Encouraging telecommuting, giving people time off for family emergencies, enabling flexible schedules, allowing employees to swap shifts, and so on…

As part of his push, Obama cited a new White House report which concludes that flexible workplace rules could increase productivity.

But he also cast the need for more humane workplaces in moral terms. “[U]ltimately, it reflects our priorities as a society — our belief that no matter what each of us does for a living, caring for our loved ones and raising the next generation is the single most important job that we have. I think it’s time we started making that job a little easier for folks,” he said.

Even so, feminists and others who have promoted these concepts for years are now sharpening their arguments about the need for making such reforms in hard times. As Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute pointed out, in advance of the conference:

We had a preview of the Forum last week in DC at the Work Life Conference, co-convened by the Families and Work Institute and The Conference Board. Speaking at the conference, Martha Coven of the White House Domestic Policy Council said that some might argue that employees are lucky just to have jobs, that companies have to focus on meeting their payrolls, and that the government needs to get the economy back on track and stabilizing it. They ask, “why workplace flexibility; why now?”

That is a false choice, she countered. Workplace flexibility is something that we have to do not only when times are good, but when times are bad. Workplace flexibility will help our businesses AND our families thrive.

While promoting “flexible workplaces” won’t do anything to stop the distorted GOP onslaught targeting Obama over jobs, he stood up for the imporance of the issue—and made clear its broader benefits.

“Workplace flexibility isn’t just a women’s issue. It’s an issue that affects the well-being of our families and the success of our businesses,” said Obama. “It affects the strength of our economy – whether we’ll create the workplaces and jobs of the future that we need to compete in today’s global economy.”

As a White House press released noted, Obama has taken the issue seriously enough to place it alongside other intiatives that aim to level the playing field for women — and strengthen out economy by promoting full and fair participation in the workplace:

“Employers, including the federal government, will have to implement flexible work policies if they want to attract the best and the brightest,” said Valerie Jarrett, Senior Adviser to the President and Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls. ” The President is committed to making sure that the federal government can compete for talent because he knows that good people produce better work, which in turn, leads to better service for the American people.”

About the Author Art Levine is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, and a former Fellow with the Progressive Policy Insititute. He has also written for Mother Jones, The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Slate, Salon and numerous other publications. He is the author of 2005’s PPI report, Parity-Plus: A Third Way Approach to Fix America’s Mental Health System, and is currently researching a book on mental health issues. Levine also posts commentary at Art Levine Confidential.

On the heels of First Lady Michelle Obama’s challenge to find ways to encourage employers to provide more flexibility to employees, Workplace Flexibility 2010, a Georgetown Law-based think tank, has released a new report outlining a comprehensive set of policy solutions to expand Americans’ access to flexible work arrangements (FWAs) such as compressed workweeks, predictable schedules, and telework. The common-ground solutions described in the report can benefit both working families and businesses.

The report draws on decades of research on changes in the American workforce – dual earner couples are now the norm; older workers need to work longer to save for retirement; men and women want to share caregiving responsibilities; many lower-wage workers work nonstandard schedules and multiple jobs to make ends meet; and more people with disabilities are working but may need a range of supports.

This increased diversity and complexity within the American workforce – combined with intensifying global competition in a 24/7 marketplace – have raised unprecedented organizational and societal challenges that impact both employers and employees. And yet, our workplaces have not caught up in a systematic or sophisticated way to these new realities. We live in a world of changing individuals and often unyielding institutions.

Flexible work arrangements support employees who struggle to meet the demands of work while also fulfilling personal responsibilities – caregiving for a loved one, volunteering, attending religious services, or obtaining job training. At the same time, they have been shown to help employers support their workforce, meet their business objectives, and increase their competitive advantage.

Workplace Flexibility 2010’s policy platform represents the culmination of years of in-depth conversations with employers, employees, managers, labor, researchers and advocates in Washington and across the country. It provides a detailed blueprint for advocates, the White House, Congress and other policymakers to build on innovative workplace flexibility strategies – and highlights numerous examples of effective business practices.

In order to make FWAs the “new normal” in the American workplace, the report recommends five complementary prongs:

• Spur a national campaign to make FWAs compelling to both employers and employees by:

Launching a strategic multi-media public education campaign; providing awards to recognize and encourage businesses to offer and implement FWAs; and conducting research on the impact of FWA practices on employees, businesses and communities and disseminating the findings.

• Provide employers and employees with the tools and training they need to make FWAs a standard way of working by:

Making training and technical assistance on how to implement FWAs readily available to both employers and employees; launching a comprehensive website with information about the needs and benefits of FWAs, FWA best practices, model policies and procedures, and federal laws and programs; clarifying perceived legal obstacles to FWAs; and removing or considering the removal of actual legal obstacles.

• Support innovations in FWAs, learn from those efforts, and disseminate lessons learned by:
Experimenting with new ideas through pilot programs – including piloting a right to request in the federal workforce; piloting FWAs for low-wage workers employed by federal contractors; and piloting private sector innovations such as mass career customization and team scheduling with new industries and employers.

• Lead by example, making the federal government a model employer by:

Demonstrating high-level support for FWAs in the federal workforce; including FWAs as a key component of the federal government’s human capital management agenda; providing training, technical assistance, and resources to support the implementation of FWAs within the federal government; and regularly assessing how FWAs are working and affecting employees, the workplace and the broader community.

• Build an infrastructure of federal, state and community players to implement the first four prongs of the effort by:

Engaging all the players at the federal state and community level who will be key to a successful effort, and creating the infrastructure at each of these levels necessary for an effective partnership among these key players.

This report sets the stage for a national conversation among employee and employer groups, other stakeholders and policymakers about innovative solutions that work well for both employees and employers. Engaging in this conversation and embarking on the necessary action steps are key to equipping our American workplaces to meet the challenges of our 21st century workforce.

About the Authors: Chai Feldblum is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., Director of Georgetown’s Federal Legislation Clinic, and Co-Director of Workplace Flexibility 2010.

Katie Corrigan is the Co-Director of Workplace Flexibility 2010 where she, along with Chai Feldblum, is responsible for overseeing the strategy, legislative lawyering, policy research, media, and constituent outreach components of the effort.

We have heard for some time that Michelle Obama’s pet concerns on the campaign trail, which she hoped to be able to continue while in the White House – and will indeed be able to after last week’s dramatic election finish for her husband, President-Elect Barack – are helping families create a healthy work/life balance and easing the struggles for military families.

It’s no wonder the former is an issue that’s close to Mrs. Obama’s heart. This article from the UK-based Telegraph newspaper talks about her own work/life balance struggles, in three distinct phases of her life: while growing up on the South Side of Chicago and seeing an ailing father continue to work hard, and leave business matters at the office; while herself transitioning from the legal field to civic and community work after marrying Barack and having their two daughters, Malia and Sasha; and most recently while Barack was on the campaign trail.

Mrs. Obama even wrote a heartfelt essay on the topic of work/life balance last month on the popular BlogHer community of women bloggers. Here’s how she spells out the plight for working women:

As we all know, our country is in the midst of a major economic crisis. And we’re all feeling the effects. …

And folks are feeling it at the workplace. Because right now, thousands of women across the country don’t have family leave at their jobs. And those who do can’t afford to take it because it’s not paid. And 22 million working women don’t have a single paid sick day.

That’s just unacceptable. Families shouldn’t be punished because someone gets sick or has an emergency.

This is from the employee perspective, but Obama’s cause has direct implications for small and midsize business leaders. Morra Aarons-Mele, a graduate student specializing in women and leadership, framed this exceptionally well recently on The Huffington Post,

Why should we care about “work life” issues when our savings and retirement funds are literally halving by the day? Because “work life,” as nondescript as it may sound, is the stuff that keeps American families afloat. Work life refers to issues ranging from sick leave to health care to early education and child care. It also encompasses flexibility and better work-life balance, which have strong effects on companies’ bottom lines and employee productivity.

So what would organizations’ employee engagement activities geared toward helping workers achieve a more harmonious balance look like – ideally – four or eight years from now? Obama hinted at this during a plenary address she gave at our annual small business leadership conference two years ago, when she spoke about creating relationships between businesses and the community.

Community organizing didn’t just help Barack become President-Elect; it has also helped his wife use resources at her present employer, the University of Chicago (and later its Hospitals) to transcend both entities from simply a “name” in their neighborhood to a visible, tangible source of inspiration and assistance.

As we spelled out in our article summarizing her remarks at our event, Obama pointed to the creation of such initiatives as school “Principal-For-A-Day” and community fitness programs as ways to not only bring the University’s and Hospitals’ employees out in the open, but to better connect their passions to their work.

This model has been readily adopted, to great effect, by some of the firms we’ve since honored as Top Small Workplaces. For instance, 2008 winner The Redwoods Group, an insurance provider for YMCAs and Jewish Community Organizations that’s based in North Carolina, requires its 100 employees to volunteer 40 hours of service annually to nonprofits. A condition of their employment, the company argues this has contributed directly to their steady employee growth (27% over the last two years) – including the ability to recruit cost effectively – and industry-low turnover (less than 6% on average the last two years).

So one plausible – again, ideal – work/life balance scenario is the government serving an encouraging, perhaps advisory role in helping small business leaders adjust their employee engagement best practices so employees can focus their passions on helping their communities, while at the same time benefitting the organization through enhanced workplace team building and lower rates of absenteeism and presenteeism.

Do you concur? Or do you see Obama’s work/life-related efforts playing out differently?

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